


Grace

by PeniG



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, Fluff, No Smut, Other, Post-Canon, but IMHO nothing to disturb a G rating, equality in love and marriage is important, non-specific discussion of supernatural sex, possible blasphemy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:02:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27286129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: They've been on their own side for awhile now, but one thing seems to be not quite equal between them. Aziraphale wants to do away with it, an idea that frightens Crowley.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 123





	Grace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mecurtin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mecurtin/gifts).
  * Inspired by [[META] Getting to an non-hierarchical Aziraphale-Crowley relationship](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19708405) by [mecurtin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mecurtin/pseuds/mecurtin). 



> The works referred to are the Queen's Thief series - The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, Conspiracy of Kings, Thick as Thieves, and Return of the Thief. You want to read them all. Trust me. Presumably Megan Whelan Turner will go on to write more similarly excellent works which will be in Aziraphale's binge pile, but Return of the Thief only came out this month and I don't know what they are yet. The remark about the lost hand is in The Return of the Thief. As for which character it is - Not Telling.
> 
> Ideas about how Grace and supernatural intercourse function are entirely my own and are not endorsed by any religious body.

“You never touch my Grace,” says Aziraphale.

“Hnghc?” Crowley replies.

A lot of things have changed, outside this room, but inside, it is much the same as it was when they first furnished their cottage: huge and hugely comfortable bed (currently huger than usual, to accommodate their wings), tartan duvet, sleek black furniture, plush carpet, Aziraphale’s current binge read (Megan Whelan Turner) in two neat stacks on his nightstand, and the latest greatest tech device powered off on Crowley’s, beside the remains of a bottle of wine and a snack of cherries and cheese. Neither is wearing anything but feathers and scales. They are warm with exercise and afterglowing in every reasonable sense of the word. Crowley tends to drift in and out of sleep stages one and two at this point, but pricks himself to better wakefulness with the edge of anxiety in Aziraphale’s voice. He is not supposed to be fretting about anything, and Crowley’s not about to stand for it. “Why should I?” He asks, hauling himself far enough into consciousness to form a coherent sentence. “It’s not an erogenous zone.”

By human standards, they don’t make love very often. By angelic standards, they’re at it like rabbits. Demons don’t have standards and would rather cut off any number of right arms than admit that anything they do could be called “making love” (however they may feel in their innermost selves), so let’s not even go there. By their own standards, these two are perfectly satisfied and that’s the main thing.

“I’m not complaining, you understand,” Aziraphale assures Crowley. “Only, it’s something I’ve noticed.”

“You mean it’s something worrying you,” says Crowley, surveying Aziraphale’s desires. The fact that Aziraphale can sense love and Crowley can sense wants simplifies some things and bypassed lots of hard conversations during the adjustment period after the world didn’t end; but the habits they developed during the six thousand years when liking each other was dangerous did not vanish overnight. The first time Crowley perceived that Aziraphale was getting into an intimate mood, and bypassed the usual song and dance of temptation in favor of creeping up on him for a surprise seduction, his hand shook so hard he could barely undo the bowtie and he half-expected to be smote by the book he was reaching around, but they’ve worked everything out by now. Or, Crowley thought they had.

At base, they are sexless beings who can, if they wish, make the effort to become sexed; but that will never entail the same urgency or inevitability or limitations that mortals take for granted. They can, for one thing, be any sex they wish - male, female, all the delightful variations subsumed under the heading of “intersex,” and configurations of primary and secondary features beyond even human diversity. Crowley can throw serpentine features into the mix. They are both in full control of how much of a mess they do or don’t want to make. Wings have their own erotic possibilities. They have swapped bodies in order to experience each other’s pleasures directly. They can stimulate each other’s nerves and neurons and synapses without any physical contact at all; and soul-to-soul, True Form to True Form, contact is beyond mind-blowing. They can interpenetrate each other on several planes of existence at once. They don’t have to come up for air if they don’t want to. They don’t have to break to refuel (but they do, because eating and drinking are fun). They can spend as many hours as they like building to an overwhelming shared climax, or declare a Guy Fawkes Night and compete to see who can give the other the most orgasms in a set time, or go half a century without so much as thinking about the subject. They have been in bed this time for about three days, and Aziraphale ought to be in a blissed-out stupor, not fretting about the only part of him Crowley has scrupulously avoided interacting with. 

Because it’s not really a part of _Aziraphale_ , is it?

“It’s not like you _want_ me handling your Grace,” says Crowley. “We don’t know what would happen.”

“We do, though.” Aziraphale grips his hand; the anchoring grip, exactly firm enough to cut off the writhe building at the base of Crowley’s spine without triggering panic at being constrained. “It passes straight through you, every time we exchange bodies; and nothing ever happens then.”

“Eeeeh, yeah, so there’s no point in touching it.”

“Or in avoiding it. And you do.”

“I don’t! Exactly. It’s, it’s irrelevant, that’s all.”

“Is it? How would we know? We’ve never experimented with it.” With his free hand, Aziraphale traces the tension in Crowley’s arms, and feathers flare and flutter against his spine. “It’s the only part of either of us we’ve never played with.”

“Not exactly something _to_ play with, is it? I mean - y’know - if anything’s serious, _that_ is.”

“What if it isn’t, though?”

Crowley’s mouth moves, but no sounds emerge. Aziraphale has his earnest, thoughtful face on, and the eyes begin to Do Things. The window of opportunity for shutting this down, whatever this is, will not be open much longer. Crowley finally manages to push out the words: “What kind of a question is _that_?” 

“The kind we’ve been afraid to ask,” says Aziraphale. “But that’s, that’s all in the past now, isn’t it? Ignoring questions is what the other sides do. Not _ours._ Certainly not basic questions, about who and what we are. And Grace _is_ basic, isn’t it?”

“I, well, I suppose so.”

“After all, it’s the only substantial difference between us, isn’t it? Everything else is only individual variation, but this - I have Grace, you don’t.”

“I was broken in the Fall and you weren’t,” says Crowley, as gently as he can. “And you can stop feeling bad about that, right now.”

“I don’t feel bad about it. Exactly. Except that I think _you_ do.”

Crowley’s not going to start lying to Aziraphale at this stage, but he's not out to upset him, either. “It is what it is, angel. I’m used to it. Like, you know, humans that lose limbs or whatever. Something about that in those books you’ve been reading, isn’t there? Isn’t that _Thief_ series the one with the character who says if he got his hand back he’d be a different person and he wouldn’t wish himself out of existence?”

“Yes, but - he’s got a hook and a choice of false hands and a real chunk of his body missing. You don’t have any prostheses - because you aren’t actually _missing_ anything. You weren’t just broken in the Fall - you were broken _and remade_. Without the Grace.”

“Exactly! I never needed it, never missed it, so there’s nothing for you to tie yourself in knots over.”

“I’m not tying myself into knots. I’m thinking something through.” 

He is, too, Crowley can see him do it, and waits, ready to leap to the rescue the moment the face journey turns down any of the paths to misery Aziraphale wore into his mind during Heaven’s long ascendancy over him. His hands and wings are steady on Crowley’s skin, neither breath nor pulse stutter, his radiance shines bright and warm, and his eyes watch Crowley’s face and his own thoughts without distress. 

“You know,” says Aziraphale. “I don’t believe _I’ve_ ever needed it, either?”

“What are you talking about? You use it for blessings all the time.”

“Well, yes, but - you’ve been blessing every bit as well as I have for centuries.”

“Not _quite_ as well -“

“Yes, you have, though! Every single blessing I’ve ever known you to cast has been just as effective, just as durable, as any blessing I’ve ever done. They’re practically indistinguishable - _absolutely_ indistinguishable to anybody who doesn’t know what to look for.”

“Well, yeah, you’d never have agreed to swap blessing and cursing assignments if there’d been any chance of someone coming along afterward and seeing what we’d done. I had to get them looking just like yours - and fueling it with, with how I feel about you made it easy enough.”

“Yes, so, why couldn’t I bless just as well, using how _I_ feel about _you?_ ”

Crowley blinks, slowly. “I don’t know, but - just because _we_ can’t tell the difference, doesn’t mean - well, _c’mon!_ It’s _Divine Love_! It has to be - to work - _of course_ it’s superior to -“

“Having experienced both, I think I am in the best position to make that judgement, and I’ll tell you flat out, the love of God is in _no_ discernible particular superior to the love of Crowley.”

Crowley winces, but no bolt falls and Aziraphale remains still and solid and shining in their bed, in Crowley’s arms and wings. “You can’t just _say_ things like that,” he protests. “Romantic declarations are all very well, but _of course_ Divine Love is superior, whether you can actually tell or not! I mean - s’ineffable and all that.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You’re the one who taught me to trust my own judgement. You can’t very well stop me now. And my judgement is not convinced that my Grace is Divine Love.”

“What are you talking about? What else could it be?”

“The Knowledge or Sensation of Divine Love.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Certainly! I know this is difficult and possibly painful for you to think about, but - _think!_ We’re married. Really married, on all planes of existence, not the kind of superficial legal connection that can be put asunder. Anyone who sees us together _knows_ that - even the least sensitive humans we’ve ever encountered together have sensed it. One flesh, as the humans put it - two individual entities, one indissoluble couple that can’t be separated without mutilating both of us. You accept that.”

“Of course I do!”

“Well, then, logically -“

“Logically, right, like ineffability is logical -“

“Logically, inevitably, to love _one_ of us is to love _both_ of us. So either She _doesn’t_ love me, and the Grace is a delusion, or She _does_ love you, and your lack of Grace is only lack of sensory input. How _else_ could it work?”

Aziraphale waits for an answer and Crowley tries to produce one. “All right,” he says. “All right. Let’s grant that for the sake of argument. Where are you going with this?”

“Nowhere you need fear to tread. You see where it leaves us, though? If God loves both of us, but only I have Grace, then Grace can’t be the love of God. In support of this, humans only have Grace when it is specifically granted to them, to make them saints - yet God loves all the humans. It’s axiomatic.”

“I’m not so sure about that, all things considered, but again - for the sake of argument, based on that reasoning, Grace would be the knowledge of Divine Love, not the actual love. So, Grace, no Grace, not a significant difference, at all, nothing for you to fret about.”

“But - it’s not _fair._ ”

“I’ve got news for you, angel, life on earth was _not_ designed to be _fair.”_

“No, indeed. But free-willed beings have the choice to impose fairness on it. Don’t we?”

This is the point at which Crowley begins to be afraid. “To a certain extent,” he concedes, watching his angel’s bright eyes, glittering with the leading edge of some scheme. “You and I in particular need to be careful how we go about it. Imposing fairness on humanity wouldn’t be fair.”

“No, indeed, but in matters purely internal to us we have a free hand, don’t we? Even an obligation, to each other, to maintain the equality without which a marriage cannot maintain itself?”

Terror roars to life. “No. Oh, no. No. Absolutely not.”

“No what?” Aziraphale’s face is at its most innocent and therefore its most bastardly.

“You are _not_ ripping out your Grace out of some cockamamy idea of making us more equal! We are plenty equal enough!”

“Are we? When you assume that my Grace is somehow superior to your love for me?”

“I don’t! You proved me wrong, all right? Miserable delusion of inferiority, gone, everything’s fine, nothing needs to change.”

“I still have something you don’t.”

“So? It’s no different than, than, I can turn into a snake and you can’t, it’s just a _difference_ , it doesn’t _matter -“_

“If it didn’t matter you wouldn’t be panicking.”

“I’m not panicking!” Crowley buries his head in Aziraphale’s bosom and struggles to control his breathing. Aziraphale holds him tight, wings and arms and legs. “We’re an angel and a demon,” says Crowley, into the warm hollow of his angel’s throat. “If we’re a demon and a demon, everything falls apart.”

“I won’t be a demon.”

“You can’t know that. If you rip out your Grace - that’s _rejecting_ Her.”

“I won’t Fall. No, Crowley, _listen._ Nobody’s Fallen since the Watchers. Only the Rebels and the Watchers have _ever_ Fallen. The Rebels violated the peace of Heaven and the Watchers violated the trust of Humankind. I’m not planning anything on that kind of scale. Besides, I’m on Earth. I’m _of Earth_ now, not of Heaven. Demons become demons during a Fall from Heaven, not from Earth. If I were ever going to Fall, I would have done it when I left Heaven. Heaven broke me. Adam remade me. My Grace stayed put. I’m as Fallen as I’m going to get. I’m certain of it.”

“Tkgpls,” says Crowley, swallowing, and swallowing again, before dragging his head into an angle from which he can look Aziraphale in the face. The steady, smiling eyes with the laugh lines in the corners; the mouth soft with affection; the stubbornly set jaw.

One of the misapprehensions about himself that Crowley has gradually been able to coax Aziraphale away from is the idea that he is a coward and Crowley is brave. The truth is, Aziraphale is brave and Crowley is reckless. Crowley had sauntered vaguely downward once, and been shocked and indignant (as well as pained and heartbroken and all the rest) when he Fell, an outcome he had in no way foreseen, and his history since then has involved a lot if jumping at opportunities and pursuing brilliant ideas without thinking through the consequences. Aziraphale, who thought all the consequences through six ways from Sunday, had endured millennia of Gabriel’s gaslighting and psychological abuse and still been able to choose the crucial moment to rebel. He’d smashed his own heart into tiny bits, trying to keep faith with Heaven, avert the Apocalypse, and free Crowley to escape to Alpha Centauri and avoid the whole mess; and when he’d realized what a mistake he’d made he’d crumpled millennia of assumptions into a ball and pitched them aside in order to swan-dive out of Heaven with both middle fingers in the air, willing to pay any penalty exacted of him. He’d stood firm to fight Satan with a flaming sword that would have done him exactly as much good as a matchstick. And now here he is, all ready to, to _mutilate_ himself, to render himself _less_ than what he was, to _lower himself_ to his husband’s level - _“Please_ , angel,” Crowley croaks. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t _mind_ you being that little bit better than me, or better _off_ than me, or whatever, whatever it is.”

“But I’m _not_ better than you, and I don’t _want_ to be better off, and I don’t _need_ it. I _don’t._ ”

“What would you even _do_ with it? Destroy it?”

“Not sure I could. We could choose a human to bestow it on. Make a saint.”

“Without authorization? Would that even work? You’d have to get consent from the human first and I can’t imagine how that conversation would go.” Sure to be interesting, though, put the cat among the pigeons... “Have you got somebody in mind?”

“No, nobody we know right now would be suitable. It would involve an extensive search, possibly tests - it would be a big production. Years of work, probably, and if Heaven got wind of it they’d oppose it.”

“So would Hell. It’s a bad idea. Better give it up.”

“Yes, I agree. I only brought it up because it was a possibility. I don’t actually want to do it.”

“What _do_ you want to do, then?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“Sensing wants isn’t a precision deal. I can tell you have something you actually want to do and it’s something about, about balancing the scales, which - I _promise_ we aren’t unbalanced and this is all terrible and unnecessary. You _don’t_ want to stop feeling that God loves you, angel. It’s cold and it’s lonely and it hurts and yeah, you get used to it and yeah you get over it, you live just fine, but there’s no reason to deprive yourself of it just because I don’t have it! _You_ don’t have to cut yourself up just because _I_ have a scar!”

“But what if I have a warm jumper and you’re cold?” Aziraphale asks, smiling his sunny stubborn bastard smile and fluttering his eyelashes. “Aren’t I allowed to share my jumper with you?”

“What?” Ah, there it is. That glorious disorienting moment of angelic surprise, still knocking Crowley off his mental feet after all these millennia. Give away a flaming sword, invite a demon to dinner, consensually possess a human to get to the Apocalypse on time - why not? “How exactly do you think you can share this jumper?”

“I thought of it last time we swapped bodies. There’s a point in the swap when the Grace goes straight through you - or you go straight through it - it all comes to the same thing. So, we come to that moment, and then you seize the Grace - firmly, mind you - and we reverse direction -“

“What, tear it in two? That’ll hurt you!”

“Will it? I don’t think it will. Not if I choose to release half of it. Not if I’m giving it to you.” Oh, here comes The Look! “It didn’t hurt giving you my heart, after all. At any rate, it won’t do any harm to try.”

“Let me - let me think about it.”

“Since when do you ever think about anything before you do it?”

Crowley rolls his eyes. “All right. We’ll try it. It won’t work anyway so it doesn’t matter. But. If it hurts you - if you feel _any_ discomfort _at all_ \- we stop. _No_ patient endurance or any of that rot. Got it?”

Aziraphale beams. “Certainly, dearest. Whatever you say.”

Crowley grumbles, stretches, polishes off the wine. Aziraphale eats the last few cherries. This won’t work anyway and then maybe the bee will fly out of the angel’s bonnet. They settle forehead to forehead, hands clasped between them. 

They don’t swap often; only when there is some pressing need for Aziraphale to appear to deal with Hellfire or Crowley with Holy Water, and in times of perfect privacy like this, when they are warded from interruptions and observation. The sensation is peculiar, and the moment when Crowley and the Grace pass each other is not the most peculiar part, normally. How is he even supposed to grasp it? But Aziraphale says: “Now, Crowley,” and he does his best, reversing his trajectory, taking hold of the golden warmth of Grace as he once handled quanta in the hearts of stars, and pulling it after him, folding himself around it as it stretches, all senses alert for any sign of distress. It won’t work, everything’ll be fine, this stuff is completely indivisible - 

And then it divides neatly in half and flows with them back into their own bodies; but he already fills this body entirely, there’s no room - he’s juggling it out in front of him at the same time that it’s cramming itself down his throat - no human observer would have seen anything, but Aziraphale is watching, is holding him, is crooning advice which Crowley follows reflexively - “Stop fighting it, you’ve got plenty of room for it -“

“Oh,” says Crowley, reeling, as it settles in; as his love for Aziraphale and the humans and Earth swells and meets a matching tenderness, and the hollow ache he got used to so long ago is - not gone, exactly - he is still a demon -

A demon loved by God and one smug angel.

“Oh,” says Crowley. “That’s - it doesn’t feel like half of anything. It feels - are you sure you didn’t give me all of it?”

“It’s love and knowledge,” says Aziraphale. “Don’t you know by now? The more of those you give away, the more you have.”

“I - did know that.” He blinks in the radiance of Aziraphale’s smile, and smiles back. “Huh. I’m already getting used to it.”

“Of course you are,” says Aziraphale. “You’re the Serpent of Eden, the Demon of Knowledge. I knew you could handle it.”

“You knew nothing of the sort,” Crowley contradicts him. “You hoped. But all right, you got your way and it’s not bad. It’s -“ _Wonderful._ “Let me walk around like this for a few days before I give you a final verdict. We might need to conduct more experiments. In the meantime, I’m ready for some coffee.”

“Ooh, yes,” says Aziraphale. “And we could make crepes, too!”

“Sure, angel. Why not?”

-30-

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Black And White](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27293728) by [Katzedecimal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katzedecimal/pseuds/Katzedecimal)




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